Items of note to knowledge workers who care about SharePoint and knowledge management.

June 04, 2009

On-Line Identity Management 2.0: DandyID

Our firm focuses a great deal on collaboration as a way to solve business problems, and we view social media tools as a great addition/complement to the Microsoft Information Worker technologies we use and advise our clients about every day. Accordingly, several of us have accounts with such services as:

Typepad (blogging)

Flickr (photo sharing)

Delicious (social bookmarking)

Twitter (microblogging).

One of the most difficult things about using all of these "best of breed" services is maintaining a centralized record of account credentials for each of these services. I recently learned of a tool that I've been looking for for quite a long time: DandyID, an on-line tool for managing, in one place, all of my on-line identities.

I tried out DandyID this week, completed my profile, associated my DandyID with my various on-line profiles (out of the hundreds they offer), and used DandyID to verify my credentials with the services that offer this option. I also was able to see where I rank among the digiterati, as far as the number and quality of my on-line presences.

I then took a link to my DandyID profile and dropped it into my e-mail signature so that people can follow me on-line using the services and accounts I've chosen to share with them. (NOTE: This is not managed on a user-by-user level via DandyID -- content is shown or hidden based on security/privacy settings in each of the individual services.)

I've used the free version to do everything I've described here, but DandyID also has a premium offering for $4.99 a month that includes social stats and analytics about how and where people interact with you on the Web. I've also yet to explore the "Contacts" functionality in DandyID -- looking for a good use case to test this.

Now, if I could only find a centralized service to manage all my passwords across those accounts...